


Made Me Go Dark.

by jannika



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-09
Updated: 2011-06-09
Packaged: 2017-11-20 02:55:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/580511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jannika/pseuds/jannika
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The little sister with an older sister who wants to save her, the fire- it's a familiar refrain to Johanna Mason.  Johanna back story with lots of time spent in 7. (The Johanna pairings here are all mostly one-sided.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Made Me Go Dark.

**Author's Note:**

> I love Johanna a lot, which is probably why what started as a little drabble turned into proper fic.

>

Seven is not a district with many surprises. Every day feels like the last, with early mornings, the constant buzz of saws, long work hours, cups of coffee and collapsing into hard beds, bones aching. Even when there are changes or new faces, everything stays routine. Still, it only takes the smallest rumor to get them all gossiping, whispering on every corner. The hope for change, no matter small, the hope for any change that isn't a death at the hands of the capital, never seems to wither.

So, in a small tucked-away village, every time a new foreman is appointed to the mill, it's all anyone talks about for days. Foreman is not actually a good job, and everyone knows it. You get a house and more money than most, but you are also blamed for every mistake, error and shortage. Too many mistakes and you'll be hung in the village square. Most foreman only last a year or so. Usually, they're promoted laborers, given the job because they're desperate, not skilled.

The year Johanna Mason is 13 a new foreman is brought in from out of town, something that hasn't happened in almost three decades. Everyone talks about it for days, but Johanna doesn't care. She doesn't see the point in being excited about someone who will be dead before the year is out.

She changes her mind the first Monday the foreman's family is in town and a new girl is sitting in her lessons. The girl has shiny black hair that reaches her shoulders and huge brown eyes and skin that looks like somehow, despite the constant trees and harsh winters of 7, she's been in the sun her whole life. She looks older than everyone else in class, but not yet tired and sad like most of their parents. She keeps smiling and it reaches her eyes and she reminds Johanna of nightly fires, warm and dancing. The new girl causes a stir in the rest of the class too, not just because of her appearance, but because when she talks her words sound like those far away districts with water and sky and space.

She talks a lot, and before their teacher even walks in she's told everyone her name is Savannah (which none of them have ever heard before) and that she's from another district. (Which is, of course, impossible. No one moves to seven from other places. Ever.) Her last claim gets some smirks and stares and whispers. All day long Johanna hears people calling the new girl a liar.

Johanna doesn't care if it's a lie or not. The new girl is still the most exciting person she's ever met, and Johanna is determined to be her friend.

*

As it turns out, Johanna doesn't have a lot of competition, a combination of the lie and the high probability she'll be shipped back out fatherless by the end of the year. By that Friday, she finds herself standing in the kitchen of the nicest house she's ever been in. Savannah doesn't seem as impressed.

"I miss home," she sighs, bouncing on her toes, "this kitchen is so cramped." Johanna is pretty sure the kitchen is bigger than her whole house, but she decides not to mention it.

"Where is home?" she asks instead. Savannah shakes her head and looks at the floor.

"I'm not supposed to say," Savannah says. Johanna understands that. Everyone has secrets. She nods.

"I've always lived here," she offers. Somehow, this seems to perk Savannah up, and she grabs Johanna's hand and bounces again.

"Let's go meet my little sister!" she enthuses. They run up the stairs. (The stairs. Her house has stairs in it, and it makes Johanna's head spin.) In a room at the top, a tiny pale girl who looks nothing like Savannah introduces herself as Atlanta. She's reading a book that doesn't look like it's from school, and Johanna wonders if they actually own books. She glances around the room and discovers that they must, because there on shelves are rows of books. Johanna gapes at them.

"Isn't it sad?" Atlanta asks, following Johanna's gaze, "I had to leave so many at home."

"You and your books," Savannah teases, "one day I'm taking you on a real adventure."

"I like the quiet, and it kind of scares me here," Atlanta says. Savannah shakes her head, and Johanna can't stop staring.

Later, after meeting Savannah's parents - her father is tall, dark, and smiles just like Savannah, and her mother has red hair and a voice like music - Savannah pulls them into the huge backyard.

"It's so cold here!" she complains, before flashing a brilliant smile and saying, "my sister gets sick a lot; it's why she started reading." She says it the way you would say someone was left handed, which Johanna can't figure out. In seven, people who get sick a lot don't get to be very old.

"She's nice," Johanna says, mostly because she doesn't know what else to say.

"She's the best," Savannah says, hugging her arms to herself. "They were places, by the way."

"What?" Johanna asks.

"Our names. They were places in home, cities, back before Panem," Savannah explains.

"Your parents named you after places that aren't there anymore?"

"They said they were beautiful cities and beautiful words for their beautiful girls," Savannah says, rolling her eyes a little like she's embarrassed. Johanna is pretty sure this is the most dangerous thing she's ever heard. It is also the most fascinating.

"How do they know they were beautiful?" Johanna asks.

"My family passed down a lot of stories," Savannah says. Johanna has never heard anything so bold. She wants to listen to Savannah talk forever.

On her way home, it occurs to her that Savannah's whole family talks like her. Like they're from somewhere else and lead exciting lives.

Johanna decides Savannah should be her best friend.

*  
Savannah knows a thousand things Johanna doesn't. She knows words for things and ideas and places that don't exist anymore, words from books, words Johanna can't even begin to pronounce.

They sound better when Savannah says them, anyway. All her words sound better, even the ordinary ones. She says it's called an accent and that she doesn't have one, the people of 7 do. Johanna is pretty sure that's backwards, but as long as Savannah keeps talking, it doesn't really matter.

Three weeks and four days after she moves in, Savannah finds something amazing and unexpected in the boring woods Johanna has been walking in her whole life. It's in a small clearing in the trees, it's made of wood, and it had all these angles and slopes and ladders and ropes and chains. Savannah calls them towers and slides and swings, calls it all a castle and a playground. Her lost-in-time words and faraway look are completely perfect for this place that seems so far from everything Johanna has ever known.

They stay all day, and even Savannah, who thinks her giant house is small and that all their lessons are boring, seems excited by this place. She says she had a slide at home, and a swing, and when she shows Johanna how to swing, how to kick her legs and make the air glide beneath her, Johanna stops questioning the truth of anything, and gives into the freedom of flying.

*

One day in midwinter, at what has become their castle, laying together on the slide, Johanna's coat old and patched Savannah's new and soft, Savannah grabs Johanna's hand.

"Can you keep a secret?" she asks, her voice an urgent whisper, so different from the light laughter they'd shared on the walk through the woods. This is the thing about Savannah - with her the whole world is exciting, everything changes all the time, from swings to secrets in an instant, and sometimes it's all Johanna can do to just keep up.

"Of course," She says.

"When we were little, Atlanta wasn't sick," Savannah says. Johanna can't picture it. In the months since they've arrived she's seen Atlanta in her bed more than anywhere else. "She used to be able to beat me in a race, and climb to a high tree branch than me, even though she was smaller." Savannah stops and glances around, frowning.

"Why is that a secret?" Johanna asks.

"Because it wasn't normal. There was some disagreement at Daddy's factory, I was too little to really hear, and then there were these people around town for a few weeks, people no one had ever seen before, and they kept standing in our yard, and sometimes they just came in the house without asking and took things, and then, when Atlanta got sick, the doctor wouldn't come," Savannah says.

"Wouldn't come?"

"Not for weeks and weeks, until Atlanta was so sick and small and yellow-looking everyone thought she'd die. Not until it was too late to really make her all the way better," Savannah says.

"Oh," Johanna says. Savannah rolls on her shoulder and turns big, scared eyes at her.

"And everyone whispered, I was too little to understand, but all the time, like they were scared and not because she was sick. And my grandfather was so mad about all the things they took, about Atlanta, and then one day a few years ago he just didn't come home," Savannah pauses and takes a long shaky breath, "he just disappeared, Johanna. He disappeared and people whispered and then men at Daddy's factory kept having accidents and dying and then more strangers saying it was his fault. And then we had to move here, and I don't think they needed him or that it's a good job. I think it's a little house where it's cold and there are woods and everyone but you is mean and I think we're here because they're punishing us."

"Punishing?" Johanna echoes, not because she doesn't believe it - the Capitol punishes all of them every day and everyone knows it - but because the rest of the story is still running through her mind, sounding like so many she's heard her mother tell neighbors that it makes her a little dizzy.

"They burned our house when we left. We had to leave at night and they burned our house and everything we left in it and everyone keeps telling me it's just a good job for Daddy and that I'll get used to the cold but I know it's a lie. I know we're in trouble and it's so scary."

"You'll be okay," Johanna says, squeezing her hand. She doesn't believe it, not for a second, but she tells Savannah anyway, because there is nothing else to tell her, nothing else to say. She can't tell her about all the foreman that came before, can't tell her that from all she knows about Savannah and Atlanta's names and from all the stories she's heard in the last few months about their house with its books and their grandfather with his stories, that she's not even a little surprised they're in trouble, so she just repeats her lie over and over - the last thing Savannah wants to hear but the only thing Johanna can give her.

*

That spring, there is a whole week when Atlanta is well enough to go outside, and the three of them run around town and the woods, Savannah and Johanna showing Atlanta all the places she's never been up to seeing. Savannah says it's almost as if they're on a " _vacation_ ", a word Johanna loves, even she's not sure what it actually means, or meant. She repeats it in her head and under her breath for days, as they show Atlanta the school yard and as the baker gives them free bread to celebrate Atlanta seeing the world. She repeats it till Savannah teases her about her accent and the three of them laugh so hard they have to sit on the edge of the forest for hours.

The word is still stuck in her head as they walk along the edge of the trees and when they go to Johanna's house to where her older brother William and her cousin Timothy make Atlanta giggle in a charming and healthy sort of way with stories about squirrels and birds and other everyday work annoyances. (Timothy has lived with them for as long as Johanna can remember. She's never asked what happened to his parents - her aunt and uncle - and she's pretty sure she never will.) Johanna's mother makes them cider, a special occasion treat, and Atlanta seems to glow.

Later, with the word still dancing in her head as Atlanta and Savannah ponder what it would have been like to have had brothers, they walk a little ways into the woods - but, without talking about it, without even a glance at each other, both Johanna and Savannah steer away from their playground castle.

"Even on vacations with sisters," Savannah says a few days later when they're alone again and laying on their favourite slide, "some things have to stay secrets between friends."

*  
Somehow, against all odds, Savannah and her family manage to stay in town for two years. They stay through winters and summers and bouts of Atlanta being well and Hunger Games and times when the whole town is about to go hungry and times when they have enough bread to share. They stay while all three girls grow up; Savannah and Johanna do much more of the growing than Atlanta. They stay so long that it almost seems like the fears Savannah voiced once were wrong.

They stay so long that Johanna is thinking about quitting school to work - she's been considering carpentry - and that Savannah has started splitting her time between home, school, Johanna, and _boys_. They stay so long that Savannah goes from the possibly lying new girl to the mysterious pretty girl with bouncy hair and great smile that makes boys follow her around all day. The same boys who snickered at her years ago now tell her how pretty she is and ask her to tell them another story about home, and the girls who glared at her glare even harder, for new reasons. Savannah seems to love the attention.

Johanna hates it. All of it. (It's one of the reasons she's thinking about quitting school, actually. Her family needs the money, and they learn the same things over and over, and she'd really rather not only see her only and best friend through a cloud of boys.)

Sometimes when they're alone, still squeezing together on their favorite slide, Savannah talks about them in a fast, breathy sort of way, describing their hair and their eyes and their muscles and who can cut trees the fastest and who is the strongest and who smiles the biggest and who can pick her up and who tells the best story. Johanna isn't quite sure how to say she doesn't care without getting Savannah mad. Normally, she just changes the subject, but that only ever works for a few minutes, and then Savannah is back to Nicholas and his big hands or Geoffrey and how he smells like trees.

"Everyone smells like trees here," Johanna interjects one day, because she can't help herself, "well not you, but everyone else."

"Really?" Savannah asks, drawing out her words like she does sometimes when she wants her accent to be even stronger. Normally she does it for boys. She studies Johanna for a second, and Johanna is briefly worried that she's said the wrong thing - the thing she's been trying to avoid saying for months with all those subject changes. Then Savannah grins and Johanna relaxes. "You think I smell different than everyone else?"

"Yes," Johanna says, shrugging and glad Savannah picked that to get stuck on.

"Really?" she asks again, nudging Johanna with her shoulder, "what do I smell like then?"

"I don't know," Johanna shrugs, "not like trees. You smell like you."

"But I live around trees just like everyone else," Savannah points out.

"Yeah. But you smell like you. Just like you talk like you even though you live here," Johanna says.

"Are you saying I have a scent accent?" Savannah asks, arching her eyebrows and making a pouty sort of face. Johanna giggles.

"I guess?" she says. "I don't know. Everything about you is kind of an accent. Different, good different. Special. Savannah," she finishes, still giggling a little.

"Special?" Savannah echoes, she bites her lip and grins, "that's better than anything a boy has said to me," She says. She stares at Johanna then, her eyes the biggest Johanna has ever seen them, still biting her lip. They're so close on the slide they they're already breathing the same air, that they're already touching in several places, and there is this crazy moment when Johanna wants move her head just a little, wants to see what would happen if she put her lips on Savannah's. Then Savannah giggles and rolls over a little so they're touching in fewer places.

"You should teach lessons to boys on perfect things to say," she says.

*  
They hold hands during the reaping, like they have every year since Savannah moved to town. Johanna is nervous; last year one of Timothy's best friends was reaped and then impaled by a tiny thirteen year old boy (who was killed himself an hour later). Timothy and William are both too old this year, and Johanna's mother had refused to let her take out any tessera, but still, she's shaking as she holds Savannah's hand. They call the boys first, and Lucas, a red-haired eighteen year old who's flirted with Savannah a few times looks sick as he walks to the stage. There is a bit of commotion, a victor from a decade ago drops something, and Johanna has visions of her name being called and what she would do and she is feeling kind of woozy when they reach for the girl's name.

There is a second then, as the paper is unfolded, when Savannah looks nervous too, and even though the thought of Savannah going is almost ridiculous, Johanna is nervous for her. Then the name is called and the entire world stops. It's not Johanna or Savannah.

It's Atlanta.

There is a muffled outrage from the crowd, mutters about her not being well and how she isn't even really from seven and maybe the poor girl should be exempt. The whispers sweep the crowd until they are silenced by guards who don't look at all sympathetic as Atlanta slowly walks to the stage. It's one of a dozen times Johanna can ever remember seeing her outside - two of them at past reapings. Atlanta looks smaller than Johanna has ever seen her look, and she seems to have gotten paler. Johanna is pretty sure she is going to be sick. Next to her, Savannah's grip on her hand is ironclad tight and cold. Johanna glances over, and it looks almost as if Savannah, her Savannah who has always had nothing but warmth, is frozen.

*

Johanna doesn't remember the rest of the day, it's all a blur of tears and goodbyes and Savannah never once letting go of her hand, even as she hugs her younger sister.

Later, while Atlanta is on the way to the capital and Savannah's parents are hiding in their bedroom, Savannah and Johanna hide in their castle, on their slide, and cry till they can't anymore.

"I told you we were in trouble," Savannah says at one point, "I told you they were punishing us."

When they walk home later - to Savannah's because Johanna already has permission to stay at Savannah's during the Games, everyone knows how close they are - Savannah tugs on Johanna's hand and pulls the to a stop.

"I should have volunteered," she says, "She's sick and I let them take her. She's my sick little sister and I let them take her."

"You didn't let them do anything. She was reaped," Johanna says.

"I could have volunteered," Savannah repeats, "like in the Career districts. I could have volunteered."

Johanna doesn't have any words at all, so she pulls Savannah into a long hug, and doesn't let her go till it gets so dark and so late it's dangerous for them to be out, and Johanna pulls them home.

*

On television, Atlanta looks even sicker, even paler, even more ill equipped for the Games, and when Caesar Flickerman asks her what her strategy is, she shrugs and says,

"I've been sick for so long, and been so sick, that people have thought I was going to die before. I guess we'll see if I can beat the odds again?"

The audience applause is deafening.

*

Atlanta doesn't make it out of the cornucopia. She can't run fast enough or jump high enough or stop coughing long enough to avoid a bow and arrow minutes after the Games begin.

*

They refuse to watch the rest of the Games. It's against about ten different rules, but they refuse anyway. Savannah says she can't watch the replays, can't watch the girl who killed her sister kill more or be killed. Johanna doesn't really feel up for it either, so they skip the Games and sneak away from the rest of town to hide at their castle. Savannah's parents don't notice they're gone.

*

One the last night of the Games they know nothing about, Johanna is terrified. She doesn't know why, but she has a feeling she can't seem to shake off, even though the worst of it should be over. Atlanta is already dead. Savannah curls into Johanna on their slide, the quiet shell of herself she's been since the reaping. Johanna runs her fingers through Savannah's hair and tries to think of comforting words and comes up with nothing.

When they've been there for about an hour, not moving and hardly talking, the footsteps start. Footsteps and voices and shadows - at first Johanna thinks it's Savannah's parents, coming to find them - but the voices never call out, and the footsteps have a heavy, demanding thud. She considers calling out herself, or running, but she just doesn't have the energy, and she hates to move Savannah.

"Do you hear that?" she asks Savannah after several minutes have passed and the footsteps and shadows are still insistent. Savannah answers by burying her face further into Johanna's shoulder. That's when Johanna hears the crackle, and smells the smoke, and before she even has time to take it in there is heat and the sound of footsteps running away. Then there is more crackling and more heat and Johanna desperately shaking Savannah, telling her to move, begging her to move, and the two of them starting to run as their playground castle burns.

Savannah stops running. She stops running, she lets go of Johanna's hand, and she walks back to their castle - the castle they found years ago, the castle they shared secrets on, the castle they never showed Atlanta, the castle Johanna had been so tempted to kiss Savannah in - the castle that has almost been home since Savannah moved in. Johanna calls out, but Savannah keeps walking, doesn't turn around, and Johanna tries to tell herself she left something or just wants to say goodbye to their castle - but then she doesn't come back, and the castle keeps burning. She doesn’t come back, and then Johanna can't see her at all, and the fire is hotter and closer to the spot they'd run to, and Johanna has to run away and leave the burning castle, leave Savannah, behind. She runs to her house and hides, terrified they're coming for her, terrified they're not, terrified she will live the rest of her life with the image of Savannah walking into that fire playing on loop in her head.

*  
Savannah's parents disappear two days later, and no one is surprised. All the whispers are about Johanna herself, and how she was there the night of the forest fire, and the things she might have seen. Johanna doesn't confirm or deny anyone. She doesn't talk about it at all.

Her mother tries to pry her out of her room and out of the walls she's thrown up around herself with a story about when her sister, Timothy's mother died mysteriously right after Timothy's birth, right after several peacekeepers claimed to be Timothy's father, and about how it was hard, but she's alright now and has her wonderful family. This story does not make Johanna feel better. In fact, it makes her roll over in her bed and refuse to talk to anyone for the next year.

*

She's reaped the following year and she's not even a little surprised. She walks to the stage, walks to the train, walks through everything, without shedding a single tear or bothering to look afraid. Before the tributes even parade, everyone is whispering about how she is not all there, about how the girl from 7 this year doesn't stand a chance. When she makes it far enough that they go home, to 7, and interview people who knew her, they all confirm the act. After all, Johanna hasn't spoken to anyone in almost a year. After all, everyone knows that what she saw the forest fire night changed her. After all, everyone knows she just isn't right anymore.

They don't know how determined she is not to die.

*  
She finds herself in the Capitol a lot, finds herself unable to stay in her house in the Victor's Village, finds she has even less to say to her family, to anyone at all, than before her Games. Part of her had thought winning the Games would be like winning back a little of what the Capitol had stolen, that she'd feel a little better. Instead she's left with new memories of kids dying to live beside Savannah's and Atlanta's. It's actually worse.

So she hides in the Capitol, going to parties only to stand on balconies and stare at the expanse of the Capitol, wondering what words Savannah would have had for it all. She goes to bars and drinks because she can, because she's a fucking (not a Savannah word, but one Johanna decides she likes after her games anyway.) victor and she can sit in the dark and drink if she wants to and no one questions it.

It's in one of those bars - they all have stupid names Johanna doesn't care enough to remember - that she meets Emerald, who claims to be a fan. Emerald is all contradictions, with her name that sounds like 1 and skin that color they get in 4 and her voice sounds kind of like Savannah's. She sits a little too close to Johanna and puts her hand on her arm a lot and they drink shots together until Johanna's head is spinning. Then they're in a back room of some sort, with a curtains and a bed, and Johanna is kissing her and she's not giggling, she's kissing back and there is more head spinning and room spinning.

When Johanna has her lips on Emerald's neck, she sounds so much like Savannah that for long moments Johanna forgets she isn't.

*

After that there are more bars, and more girls with accents - always with accents. Sometimes they are dark like Savannah, sometimes tiny and blonde, sometimes with crazy Capitol hair colors and skin markings, but always with accents. The Capitol, it turns out, is full of people with accents and girls who like the lips of other girls. Johanna is pretty sure it has to be the best thing about the Capitol. There is always drinking and there are always back rooms and it always manages to both bring Savannah closer and make everything else fade away.

*  
She's getting a reputation. People don't exactly keep quiet when they've slept with victors, even underage ones from 7 who don't say much at all. So she probably shouldn't be surprised when she gets called into speak to President Snow himself. He lectures her on behavior for victors, and she thinks she's about to be told to be more discrete, but instead he tells her she's a _commodity_ and that normally it's the male victors sleeping with the pretty girls, but if that's her thing than he would highly appreciate it if she would do him a few _favors_ and go pay some visits to some very bored and unsatisfied officials' wives.

Johanna stands up and tells him she might be a murderer but she is not a fucking hooker. (That one is a Savannah word, one she used to swear she read about in a book back home. Johanna is pretty sure she would blush to hear it used like this.)

Then she walks out of his office.

*

Two days later she gets word that her house in 7 burnt to the ground with her whole family inside. There were no survivors.

*

Johanna is at her favorite bar watching the tribute she'd mentored this year try to find shelter from a sudden Gamemaker blizzard, when Finnick slides into her booth. They've met a few times, but Johanna doesn't have friends, so she's not sure what he wants when he grins across the table at her.

"I think," he says, with just enough of an accent that she can't hate him for the way he's smirking - even if a 4 accent isn't quite the same - "that you and I have a lot in common."

"I doubt that," Johanna says, which just makes Finnick grin wider.

"You're wrong. I think we should be friends."

"Why?"

"Because everyone needs a friend, even girls who turn down Snow's offers and have a thing for accents," Finnick says.

"How do you know that?" Johanna asks.

"I know everything," Finnick says, "everyone's secrets."

"You can't," Johanna says.

"I do," Finnick says, easy grin still in place.

"You can't know all of mine," Johanna says, crossing her arms.

"You could tell me," Finnick says, "and then we’ll see how much I already knew."

"Why would I tell you?" Johanna asks.

"Because I'm really good at secrets, and you need a friend," Finnick says.

And then he stares at her and buys her drinks till she tells him everything.

He is, actually, a really good friend.

*  
Katniss Everdeen.

Katniss fucking Everdeen.

Johanna hates her. Hates her more every moment leading up to her Games. Hates her and the way she volunteers to save her sister, volunteers in fucking 12 of all places. She hates her and her stupid on fire costumes and her stupid interview answers. She hates her and high scores and her holding-her-hand district partner. She hates her stupid name. She hates everything about her.

"Do you think they're trying to torture me?" she asks Finnick on cornucopia night.

"What?"

"Do you think she's a plant by Snow, just to get to me? With the sister thing and the fire thing?" she asks.

"No," Finnick says.

"No?"

"No, I think she's a kid from 12 with a district partner in love with her and a sister counting on her. The similarities to Savannah are because you put them there. You want to see them," Finnick says, sipping his drink.

"I do not want to see them," Johanna snaps.

"I think you do."

"I think that Snow will do anything to hurt any one of us that he can think of. Look at you, Finnick. How many calls do you have to make tonight? How many officials and their wives at once do you have to see? All because he knows what you love. He would do this," Johanna insists. Finnick glares at her and just for a minute she almost feels bad. She knows it's low to use what he does and to use Annie against him like that, but she had to make her point.

"She's just a kid from 12," Finnick repeats, "if it was all about Savannah, or all about you, wouldn’t she be from 11 or 7? I think you're seeing things here, and I think all of this is terrible enough on its own. You don't need to add planted girl conspiracies to it all."

"I still think it's possible," Johanna says.

"She reminds you of your past, that's all."

"Fine," Johanna says, not because part of her still doesn't think it's possible - even if that part is starting to sound less and less believable - but because Finnick really does have to go soon, and she doesn't want to spend their time arguing. "Am I allowed to hate her anyway?"

"Absolutely."

*  
Katniss Everdeen wins her games, saves her in-love-with-her distract partner, and starts a rebellion.

Johanna still hates her.

*  
They end up building a revolution around Katniss, and Johanna hates it every step of the way. She hates the Capitol more, wants revenge and rebellion more, but that doesn't mean she has to play nice.

*

Later, Finnick chides her - the whole naked in front of Katniss thing - but really. Johanna just couldn't help herself.

"Maybe if we win this thing you can get naked with her for real," Finnick says, smirking.

"Miss 'Still doesn't seem to know how much that guy loves her' over there? Please." Johanna says. (Johanna is perfectly aware his name is Peeta. She's just not sure she cares.)

"Maybe she doesn't notice because she was noticing you," Finnick says.

"Maybe she doesn't notice because she's a device sent to torture me and I hate her," Johanna retorts.

Finnick rolls his eyes at her.

*

Being tortured by the Capitol is probably the worst thing the series of terrible things that have been her life. Probably. It's hard to say, but the part where in the midst of everything else they're doing to her she's forced to relive the deaths of Savannah and Atlanta and shown footage of her family burning and made to rewatch both of her games, made to stare at the faces of the kids she killed and then made to feel the pain of every injury fresh again, that makes a strong case for most horrible.

*

In 13, everything is stark and cold and sterile and while she's grateful to have been rescued, Johanna is uncomfortable here too. Still, when they take her morphling away and she gets to steal some from Katniss, it feels a little bit like justice, and it makes her smile.

*

For a little while, Katniss is less horrible and they are working towards a goal and Johanna feels like they might actually accomplish something and take down the Capitol and Snow and avenge all those deaths. For a little while she thinks maybe she and Katniss could take him down together, kill Snow and be the heroes they deserve to be. She thinks in some ways it would pull all the loose, raw, hurting ends of her life together into a knot she could work with.

Of course, it doesn't work out that way, and she's back laying in bed, helpless and angry while Katniss fucking Everdeen goes off to save the day with Finnick and a wired wrong Peeta at her side.

Johanna is pretty sure the least Katniss can do is kill Snow.

*

Katniss brings her a branch that smells like home. Not like fire, not like the morphling drips of the hospital wing, not like Savannah, but like home, like trees.

Johanna didn't know she'd missed the scent so much.

*

Everyone is dead and everything is wrong. Finnick is dead and Prim, the sister who got saved, is dead and Katniss's eyes are dead and there are bodies everywhere and they could be anyone, because everyone is dead. Soldiers and civilians, officials and kids, Finnick and little sisters and the girls who couldn’t save them and families. Dead.

Johanna doesn't what harm anymore death can do. They're all dead anyway. Nothing is right - they're in charge and they won but it's wrong, so she votes yes. Yes on one more Games - even if she knows Annie is right. Finnick would have disapproved.

She just can't see how it matters.

*

When Katniss shoots Coin and then hides from the world, Johanna thinks maybe in another world they could have been friends, because everything about Katniss since the her sister died has been a thing Johanna has understood.

*

She tries to go home for a while, but it's wrong there too, and feels just as dead as in the Capitol. So she takes some seeds and brings them south with her and asks Annie if she can plant them in the yard and stay for a while.

At least in 4 they have accents.


End file.
